SAH Members in the News

Essay by Keith EggenerWhen Architecture StopsFrom the Vienna Secession’s Sacred Spring to the Utopie group’s “inflatable moment,” the language of modernism buzzed with brisk, bouncy notions: youth and rebirth, dynamism and volition, organicism and élan vital. Yet few architects or critics of this era— Louis Sullivan, Adolf Loos and Jane Jacobs being notably cranky exceptions — gave due regard to the flipside of this talk. All things, however highly charged, eventually run down and fall apart. This is as true for anthills as it is for ants and anteaters. As the playwright John Webster wrote centuries ago, “All things have their end. Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men, must have like death that we have.” [2]